Congressional Testimony Part III: Slow the Train Down Before It Runs You Over

This is the third in a three-part series. Read Part I: Preparation and Part II: Message.

In our prior articles, we discussed the first two pillars of successful congressional testimony, preparation and message. Now let’s turn to the third pillar: discipline. Because the old saying is true: “He who writes the rules wins the game.” In our practice, we offer 10 key rules for witnesses, but for the sake of brevity, we’ll just focus on three here. 

Take your time

This is the most important rule, and it is the rule from which everything else follows. Slow this train down before it runs over you. You cannot do everything you need to do in your head to be a good witness and do it quickly.

More importantly, if you engage in a rapid-fire back-and-forth — question, answer, question, answer — the faster you go, the sooner someone is going to screw up. In tennis, that’s part of the game, but one of the players in this game — you, the witness — is invulnerable. If the questioner screws up, no one cares. They are just the questioner. But if the witness screws up, it is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s so important for a witness to understand how grotesquely unfair that is and that the only person in that room concerned about slowing this thing down is you.

It’s very unnatural to slow down. We don’t talk in a normal conversation that way. Question, pause, answer, stop. Telling someone to do something so unnatural in a natural way is ridiculous. 

Treat this unnatural process mechanically right from the beginning, and be consistent throughout. After each question you are asked, count to five. Believe us, it’s hard to do and takes practice. But if you can do that, if you can train yourself to slow down, and you can then train everyone else in the room to slow down. It is the first and most critical step in regaining control of a situation that would appear, on its face, you have no control of. 

But the truth is it’s your testimony. You have the right and a responsibility to maintain some degree of control, and that begins with slowing down.

Understand what you’re doing. You are dictating the first and final draft of an important document that someone is going to pick apart and use against you. And your dictating machine is broken. Some of us dictate documents or emails all the time. It’s easy. And if we don’t like the way it came out, we can rewind, erase, cut and paste, or just stop and start over. But here, when it really counts, you have none of that. You don’t have a rewind button. You don’t have an erase button. It is what it is. 

What that means is that you have to go slowly. You can’t possibly dictate the first and final draft of an important document and do it quickly and do it right. Take your time.

Be relentlessly polite

We don’t just tell witnesses to simply be polite. Rather, we tell them to be relentlessly polite because that’s the job of a witness. 

If a witness is defensive, angry or upset, they’re not going to be able to do what they need to do to be a good witness. Guess what? Questioners know that. So, they’ll throw in sarcasm, righteous indignation, even insults, whatever it takes to try to throw you off your game. Don’t let them do it. 

Kill them with kindness. Don’t engage, don’t argue. It’s hard, because often the questioner is not interested in being polite. They’re not really interested in what you have to say at all. 

They’re interested in creating sound bites, and depending on their persuasion, that interest may be in a negative sound bite. But don’t take the bait. That’s one of the most important choices you can make in congressional testimony. Don’t adopt their negative energy. Kill them with kindness. Tell the truth. Answer the question. And go home.

Don’t answer a question you don’t understand

Let’s be honest, you’re going to get asked a lot of very bad questions. It just comes with the territory. A lot of the time, a representative is reading a question that someone else wrote, and that person may have written it well or they may not have. The representative may read it well or they may not — who knows? If it’s just not clear, say so.

Lots of questions contain assumptions. The problem is, in a normal conversation, we often ignore the assumptions. We just go to the gist of the question. And we answer it. Don’t do that here. If a question contains assumptions that you don’t agree with 100%, don’t answer the question, address the assumptions.

Don’t answer a question you don’t understand. Now, you can’t simply say nothing, so what are your options? You have several. 

• Ask them to rephrase. Plain and simple. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand the question. Can you please rephrase it?” Relentlessly polite. 
• Own the question. Embrace it, make the part you understand your own, while rejecting the part you don’t understand. “I’m not sure I understood the question, but what I can tell you is: X, Y and Z.”
• Question the language. “Listening to your question, Congressman, I’m not sure what you meant by X. Could you please clarify?” 
• Challenge the assumptions. “Listening to your question, Congressman, I don’t agree with your assumption that the moon is made of green cheese.” 

Two other questioning tactics are worth mentioning here. 

• Paraphrasing: Questioners love to paraphrase. “Well, isn’t it correct that the moon is made of green cheese? Wouldn’t you agree with that? Isn’t that fair to say?” If someone’s paraphrasing, they’re often doing it for the wrong reasons. They’re doing it to distort or twist something. Say so. “No, I’m sorry, that’s not how I would put it.” Or “No, I can’t agree with that.”  Be careful with paraphrasing.
• Yes or no: Many questions that are posed as yes-or-no questions are not really yes or no for many different reasons. A bit of ancient wisdom attributed to Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician, sums this up beautifully: “The oldest, shortest words, yes and no, are those which require the most thought.” You can always say, “I’m sorry, I can’t answer that just yes or no.”

This kind of discipline takes preparation and practice. But with it, you can take back a degree of control and fairness over this important process.